A new study from my new neurobiologist hero Hitoshi Morikawa concludes that alcohol consumption triggers a kind of subconscious learning, different than say,

Whoa! Hold on there SCIENCE! I thought beer made me forget stuff, like my credit card at the bar or where I put my shoes or where am I?

When we drink alcohol (or shoot up heroin, or snort cocaine, or take methamphetamines), our subconscious is learning to consume more. But it doesn’t stop there. We become more receptive to forming subsconscious memories and habits with respect to food, music, even people and social situations … Among the things we learn is that drinking alcohol is rewarding. We also learn that going to the bar, chatting with friends, eating certain foods and listening to certain kinds of music are rewarding. The more often we do these things while drinking, and the more dopamine that gets released, the more “potentiated” the various synapses become and the more we crave the set of experiences and associations that orbit around the alcohol use.
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An archaelogist from Simon Fraser University says that Stone Age farmers domesticated grain not because they were tired of having to go out and kill their dinner but because they liked to get loaded with friends.

That’s right: You have beer lovers to thank for the rise of modern agriculture. This been the theory for some years now, but Brian Hayden says more evidence keeps turning up.

“In traditional feasts throughout the world, there are three ingredients that are almost universally present,” he said. “One is meat. The second is some kind of cereal grain, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, in the form of breads or porridge or the like. The third is alcohol, and because you need surplus grain to put into it, as well as time and effort, it’s produced almost only in traditional societies for special occasions to impress guests, make them happy, and alter their attitudes favorably toward hosts.” … The brewing of alcohol seems to have been a very early development linked with initial domestication, seen during Neolithic times in China, the Sudan, the first pottery in Greece and possibly with the first use of maize.

But that’s not all! Once they figured out how to make great brew they had to invent a way to get it out of their bottles, which I imagine went something like this: